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Indoctrination @ Newton High,a new video released today by Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), exposes a pattern of anti-Israel teachings found in Newton, Massachusetts high schools, including:

Newton’s high schools have used Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) maps that falsify the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Newton students were not told that the maps were created by the PLO’s propaganda unit.

Newton’s schools presented students with a falsified version of the Hamas Charter. In Newton’s doctored version the word ”Jews” – as a target of hatred — is replaced with the word “Zionists.”

In one lesson, Newton students are asked to consider the Jewish state’s right to exist. (The legitimacy of no other nation-state’s existence is questioned.) The lesson included “expert” opinions, which are drawn overwhelmingly from anti-Israel academics and anti-Semitic activists.

A book used in Newton high schools has a recommended reading list that includes the extremist writings by Muslim Brotherhood leaders including Sayyid Qutb, and Yusuf Qaradawi, whose sermons call for the murder of Jews and homosexuals.

Charles Jacobs, APT President said, “The video also shows that Saudi, Palestinian, and other Arab-funded teaching materials have been inserted into the curriculum, much of it containing anti-Israel bias.”

The Saudi funded Arab World Studies Notebook was used in Newton high schools until public pressure forced its removal. The Notebook, condemned by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and rejected bymany other school boards, teaches students, among other things, that Israeli soldiers murder Palestinian women. Newton’s Superintendent of Schools David Fleishman claimed that use of the Notebook helps develop “critical thinking skills.”

The video’s release follows news reports of anti-Semitic incidents, including hateful graffiti found in Newton North High School and at the F.A. Day Middle School. The graffiti featured swastikas and the genocidal statement “Burn the Jews.” According to media reports, Newton Day school officials – in violation of required mandatory reporting procedures – failed to inform parents and police about the incidents. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) expressed concerns about these escalating anti-Semitic incidents.

Upon discovering racist graffiti at Boston Latin High School, city, state, and federal agencies immediately launched an investigation into the matter. Jacobs said, “Concerned parents in Newton demand equal protection for Jewish students. Accordingly, in light of Newton’s biased education, its ongoing refusal to allow public access to curricula and teaching materials, and the recent escalation of anti-Semitism, we urge Newton Mayor Setti Warren, Massachusetts’ state education officials, and the FBI to investigate this hateful situation in Newton schools.”

The world as understood by Islamic nations varies wildly from the Western nations’ understanding of the world. Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies.

This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere. When the Islamic State declared that it will “conquer Rome” and “break its crosses,” few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam’s founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources — words and goals that prompted over a thousand years of jihad on Europe.

Most recently, the Islamic State released a map of the areas it plans on expanding into over the next five years. Not only are Mideast and Asian regions included, but the map includes European lands: Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, parts of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, and Cyprus.

The reason for this is simple. According to Islamic law, once a country has been conquered (or “opened,” as the euphemistic Arabic words it), it becomes Islamic in perpetuity.

This, incidentally, is the real reason Muslims despise Israel. The motivation is not sympathy for the Palestinians — if it was, neighboring Arab nations would’ve absorbed them long ago, just as they would be absorbing all of today’s Muslim refugees. No, Israel is hated because the descendants of “apes and pigs” — according to the Koran — dare to rule land that was once “opened” by jihad and therefore must be returned to Islam. (Read more about Islam’s “How Dare You?” phenomenon to understand the source of Islamic rage.)

All of the aforementioned European nations are seen as being currently “occupied” by Christian “infidels” and in need of “liberation.” This is why jihadi organizations refer to terrorist attacks on such countries as “defensive jihads.”One rarely hears about Islamic designs on European nations because they are large and blocked together, altogether distant from the Muslim world. Conversely, tiny Israel is in the heart of the Islamic world, hence it has received most of the jihadi attention: it was a more realistic conquest. But now that the “caliphate” has been reborn and is expanding before a paralytic West, dreams of reconquering portions of Europe — if not through jihad, then through migration — are becoming more plausible, perhaps more so than conquering Israel.

Because of their historical experiences with Islam, some central and east European nations are aware of Muslim aspirations. Hungary’s prime minister even cited his nation’s unpleasant past under Islamic rule (in the guise of the Ottoman Empire) as a reason to disallow Muslim refugees from entering. But for more “enlightened” Western nations — that is, for idealistic nations that reject or rewrite history according to their subjective fantasies — Hungary’s reasoning is unjust, inhumane, and racist.

To be sure, most of Europe has experience with Islamic depredations. As late as the 17th century, even Iceland was being invaded by Muslim slave traders. Roughly 800 years earlier, in 846, Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim raiders.

Some of the Muslims migrating to Italy vow to do the same today, and Pope Francis acknowledges it — yet he still suggests that “you can take precautions, and put these people to work.”

Perhaps because the UK, Scandinavia, and North America were never conquered and occupied by the sword of Islam — unlike the southeast European nations that are rejecting Muslim refugees — they feel free to rewrite history according to their subjective ideals. Specifically, they stress that historic Christianity is bad and all other religions and people are good. Indeed, books and courses on the “sins” of Christian Europe from the Crusades to colonialism abound. (Most recently, a book traced the rise of Islamic supremacism in Egypt to the disciplining of a rude Muslim girl by a Christian nun.)

Even good, authoritative books of history contribute to this distorted thinking. While such works may mention “Ottoman expansion” into Europe, the Islamic element is omitted. Turks are portrayed as just another competitive people, out to carve a niche for themselves in Europe with motivations no different than, say, the Austrians, their rivals. That the “Ottomans” were operating under the distinctly Islamic banner of jihad, just like the Islamic State is today, is never made clear.

Generations of this false history have led the West to think that being suspicious or judgmental of Muslims is unacceptable, and that Muslims need to be accommodated. Perhaps then, they’ll like the West.

Such is progressive wisdom.

Meanwhile, in schools across much of the Muslim world, children are being indoctrinated into glorifying and reminiscing about the jihadi conquests of yore — conquests by the sword and in the name of Allah. While the progressive West demonizes European/Christian history — when I was in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was a hero, when I got into college, he became a villain — Mehmet the Conqueror, whose atrocities against Christian Europeans make the Islamic State look like boy scouts, is praised every year in “secular” Turkey on the anniversary of the savage sack of Constantinople.

The result of Western fantasies and Islamic history is that today Muslims are entering the West unfettered in the guise of refugees. They refuse to assimilate with the “infidels,” and form enclaves — in Islamic terminology, ribats – that serve as frontier posts to wage jihad against the infidel one way or another.

This in not conjecture. The Islamic State is intentionally driving the refugee phenomenon, and has promised to send half a million people — mostly Muslims — into Europe. It claims that 4,000 of these refugees are its own operatives:

Just wait. … It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.

It is often said that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it. What happens to those who rewrite history in a way to demonize their ancestors while whitewashing the crimes of their ancestors’ enemies? The result is before us. History is not repeating itself; sword-waving Muslims are not militarily conquering Europe. Rather, they are being allowed to walk right in.

Turkish President Erdogan’s claim that Columbus encountered a mosque in Cuba (the explorer actually saw a rock whose shape he compared to the dome of a mosque) and a Saudi Imam claiming that Columbus had sailed to America to attack Muslims are typical of an emerging genre of Muslim revisionist history that lays claim to America based on an imaginary earlier Muslim presence here.

While these examples may be laughable, Muslim historical revisionism has taken root in academia. It can be found in PBS broadcasts and in a recent New York Times piece.

In the New York Times, Peter Manseau asserts that, “There is an inconvenient footnote to the assertion that Islam is anti-American: Muslims arrived here before the founding of the United States — not just a few, but thousands.”

The description of Islam as anti-American has nothing to do with the Muslim date of arrival. Instead it refers to Islam’s theocratic erosion of the line between mosque and state, its theological doctrines of violence against non-Muslims and women, as well as the belief of a succession of killers crying “Allahu Akbar” that they can achieve a paradise full of virgins by killing Americans. The Muslims who had the biggest influence on the United States were nineteen men who boarded planes on September 11.

But Manseau goes on to offer up three examples of Muslims in the early days of the United States.

“In 1528, a Moroccan slave called Estevanico was shipwrecked along with a band of Spanish explorers near the future city of Galveston, Tex. The city of Azemmour, in which he was raised, had been a Muslim stronghold against European invasion until it fell during his youth. While given a Christian name after his enslavement, he eventually escaped his Christian captors and set off on his own through much of the Southwest.”

Manseau neglects to mention that Estevanico or Esteban de Dorantes was African, not Arab. Morocco was a major slave market and Africans in Morocco today are still often taunted as slaves. If Estevanico was ever Muslim, it was because he or his ancestors had been enslaved and converted to Islam.

And Manseau’s history only gets worse.

Estevanico didn’t escape his masters. He set out as a scout for them. He did disobey them by resuming a faith healing routine that began during an earlier journey in which he along with some members of his expedition claimed to be a “Son of the Sun” and cured diseases with the sign of the cross.

It’s hard to think of a less Islamic form of behavior.

During his expedition, Estevanico pretended to be a shaman, gathered followers, including a harem, and demanded turquoise and women from the local Indians in exchange for magical healing. Meanwhile he sent back crosses of different sizes to his Spanish masters to show them the most promising Indian villages. Eventually he reached the Zuni who killed him for, in some accounts, wearing offensive shamanic clothing from other tribes or for demanding women from them.

Zuni accounts claim that he molested their women. A similar report comes from Coronado who said that, “The Indians say that they killed him here because the Indians of Chichiticale said that he was a bad man and not like the Christians who never killed women, and he killed them, and because he assaulted their women, whom the Indians love better than themselves.”

Black nationalists tried to make a hero out of Estevanico, but he makes a remarkably poor hero. He was a scam artist exploiting the native population, aiding the Spaniards and abusing women along the way. Some of this makes him a tolerably passing Muslim, but there is no real evidence that he was a Muslim aside from his land of origin. At times he appears to have practiced Christianity and later adopted the persona of an Indian shaman. Manseau tries to put the best face possible on his history but deceives readers in much the same way that his hero deceived the native population.

But Manseau’s next “Muslim” hero is if anything even worse than Estevanico.

“The best known Muslim to pass through the port at New Orleans was Abdul-Rahman Ibrahim ibn Sori, a prince in his homeland whose plight drew wide attention. As one newspaper account noted, he had read the Bible and admired its precepts, but added, ‘His principal objections are that Christians do not follow them,’” Manseau writes.

This description once again leaves out quite a lot.

The so-called Prince Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori has been a major figure in Muslim revisionist history. He appeared in a PBS documentary which was targeted to black audiences. Unfortunately for them, Abdul Rahman was actually a racist who boasted that “not a drop of Negro blood runs in his veins. He places the Negro on a scale of being infinitely below the Moor.”

He was notorious for his abuse of slaves. A letter mentions that, “M. Foster actually made him manager of the plantation, had continually to keep an eye upon him and to curb his sanguinary temper to prevent him from exercising cruelty on his fellow servants.”

Abdul Rahman, by his own account, was a Muslim Moor sold into slavery by the Africans he had been attacking. He was a violent racist who despised Africans and abused the slaves under his power.

The parallel with Estevanico’s abuse of the native population is striking.

However much of what we know about Abdul Rahman came from his own mythmaking. It’s quite likely that he was never a prince of anything. Like Estevanico, he may have just been a talented con artist who was good at raising money by telling stories.

And during his grand tour of America, he promised to introduce Christianity to Africa.

As Muslim role models go, Abdul Rahman manages to be even worse than Estevanico. Manseau leaves all these details out because they change the narrative. Neither of his Muslim role models appears to have been particularly Muslim. Both casually dabbled in Christianity when it suited them.

But Manseau goes on. “Among the enslaved Muslims in North Carolina was a religious teacher named Omar ibn Said. Recaptured in 1810 after running away from a cruel master he called a kafir (an infidel), he became known for inscribing the walls of his jail cell with Arabic script. He wrote an account of his life in 1831, describing how in freedom he had loved to read the Quran, but in slavery his owners had converted him to Christianity.”

Manseau fails to mention that “Omar was regularly willing and able to reassure all visiting Christians that he was a true convert as he often wrote in Arabic what he called ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and the Twenty-Third Psalm.” Or “Prince Moro’s” eager wish that “Mohamedans may receive the gospel.”

Not to mention Omar’s autobiography in which he wrote that, “When I was a Mohammedan I prayed thus… But now I pray “Our Father”, etc., in the words of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.”

Manseau’s description of Omar’s autobiography is blatantly dishonest. As with Estevanico and Abdul Rahman, he has to leave out basic facts of the lives of these “Muslims” to accommodate his agenda. But Manseau is following in the footsteps of other revisionist historians who insisted that Omar’s copying of material from the Koran in an Arabic he had mostly forgotten proved his commitment to Islam.

The basic fact he has to leave out is that Omar described himself as a devout Christian. His other two “Muslims” consist of a man who promised to bring Christianity to Africa and another who played a shaman when he wasn’t making crosses.

The deceits of Peter Manseau and the New York Times, which never bothers fact checking even the wildest Muslim claims, are in their own way every bit as dishonest as Erdogan’s Cuban mosque. The difference is that they have the protective coloration of academia and journalism. Their dishonesty is more sedate and buried under protective layers of omissions and distortions.

Revisionist Muslim histories of America should be rejected, whether they come from Erdogan or the New York Times, because they are built on lies. And a history built on lies cannot stand.

“The Encyclopaedia of Jewish-Muslim relations from their origins to the present day” and the more modest English version, published by Princeton, promises to be the official academic encyclopedic bible (quran?) of Islamic revisionism and historical inaccuracy according to the sharia.

The great Islamic lies are being given serious treatment by serious quisling academics. Lies and distortions with gravitas, my friends. The bloody and brutal history of Islamic Jew-hatred is scrubbed with an iron brush. Brainwashing 4.0.

One has to wonder how much the sniveling 12-member scientific committee that approved the outrageous lies pimped themselves out for.

A perplexing rewriting of history, Lynn Julius, Times of Israel, April 16, 2014

Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish thinker and physician, is famous for his Guide for the Perplexed. But readers of a glossy new 1150-page encyclopedia in English and French will be equally perplexed by accounts of Maimonides’ life that can’t even agree on the correct year of his birth.

The joint editors are a Tunisian professor at the university of Nanterre (Paris), Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Benjamin Stora, a Jewish professor of North African history and author of a history of the Jews of Algeria. The two men have been touring France, North Africa, Israel and Belgium promoting the encyclopedia.

“The Encyclopaedia of Jewish-Muslim relations from their origins to the present day” was launched in November 2013. There is a more modest English version, published by Princeton.

Prior perusal of the opening pages of Varisco’s 2007 Reading Orientalism: Said and Unsaid did not raise hopes for his briefing “Khutba vs. Khutzpa: Islamophobia on the Internet.” In this book, Varisco analyzes leftwing intellectual Edward Said’s Orientalism and its legacy, expressing agreement “with most of Said’s political positions on the real Orient.” Varisco reveals his discipleship of Said with condemnations of post-World War II United States having “become by stealth and wealth the neo-colonial superpower” in which a “neocon clique…engineered the wars” not just “against” Iraq but also Afghanistan. Varisco’s one-sided estimate of historical harms includes a “PhD cataloguing of what the West did to the East and self-unfillfulling political punditry about what real individuals in the East say they want to do to the West.”

Yet, Varisco writes, “Said hardly scratched the surface of the vast sewerage of racist and ethnocentrist writing, art, and cinema that for so long has severed an imaginary East from the dominating West.” “In particular,” Varisco emphasizes,

almost anything that Muslims would consider holy has at one time or another been profaned by Western writers. Perhaps the frustrated worldwide Muslim anger at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was emetic justice for centuries of vicious and malicious verbal abuse from the West, where this controversial best seller incubated.

Both matters of principle and practicality deter further reading of Varisco. “Truth with a capital T does not exist for anyone,” Varisco nonsensically proclaims as one of his “own operational truths,” thereby placing in doubt Varisco’s views. Varisco’s attempts at humor also do not amuse, such as when he describes the book’s “anal citational flow of endnotes” designed to allow a person to “read for entertainment” Varisco’s turgid tome.

Nothing improved during Varisco’s presentation on “Islamophobia,” described in a Powerpoint image referencing a 1991 Runnymede Trust report as an “unfounded hostility” towards all things and persons Muslim. One Powerpoint on “Combatting Islamophobia on the Internet” set a leveling tone with a recommendation of a “[f]ocus on interfaith efforts, noting that all religions have positive and negative aspects.” This accorded with Varisco’s prior call for scholars to “be doing all we can to refute the notion that Islam is intrinsically more violent than other religions.” “I am not saying that these things don’t happen,” Varisco conceded when showing a picture of a woman undergoing a sharia stoning to death. Another Powerpoint, meanwhile, simply dismissed as “fallacy” controversies that “Muhammad was a pedophile and Islam is cruel to women.”

In discussing the 1797 American treaty with Tripoli, meanwhile, Varisco bizarrely claimed that “we were doing a lot of trade” with the Barbary States. As any schoolboy should know, though, this treaty, including a tribute payment, was part of American trade protection efforts against Barbary pirate depredations scourging the Mediterranean for centuries. Varisco then noted with a Powerpoint image America’s subsequent Barbary Wars resulting from the failure of diplomacy to dissuade the Barbary pirates from their attacks. “Economics is always in there somewhere,” Varisco stated in a similarly bizarre fashion when discussing the United States’ first encounter with jihadists.

The little discussed elephant in the room for perceptive “Islamophobia” observers during Varisco’s presentation, though, was “Islamophobe” Number One, Jihad Watch website founder Spencer. Varisco cited a Spencer quotation from his book Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics listed at the website Spencer Watch. Varisco once again failed to explain why Spencer’s condemnations of Islam as an “often downright false revelation” and “threat to the world at large” were unacceptable. Varisco also noted a recent Jihad Watch entry criticizing his very Georgetown briefing.

Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project, an organization combating the misuse of human rights law against Western societies. You may follow Harrod on twitter at @AEHarrod.

“I have a real issue with the Old Testament” and the “mixing up” of ancient and modern Israel, the late Edward Said’s sister Grace stated during the November 8-9, 2013, Waging Peace in Palestine & Israel conference in Washington, DC. As previously analyzed, this event of self-professed Christians castigated modern Israel’s entire existence as unjust, yet, as Said indicated, Israel’s Biblical past did not go unscathed at the conference either. The conference’s revisionist history delegitimized Israel with a transformation of the Bible’s Jewish heritage into the inheritance of a Palestinian people who in turn appeared unified across centuries and cultural divides.

Mitri Rehab, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor from Bethlehem, set a Biblically jarring, anachronistic tone in a keynote address on the morning of November 9, the conference’s single full day of events. As a “Palestinian Arab Christian” born in Bethlehem five years before the 1967 Six Day War, Rehab spoke of the Bible as “our story,” the “story of my forefathers.” The “Bible did not originate in the Bible Belt,” Rehab analyzed, but “actually in Palestine.” When discussing Jeremiah in the Old Testament, Rehab praised this prophet’s faith in God “to invest in Palestine” (Jeremiah 32:6-15).

Rehab thereby appeared to advocate the theses of individuals like the leftwing Israeli Jew Schlomo Sand, author of the The Invention of the Jewish People. Available for purchase at the conference, this 2010 book argued in a discredited thesis (see here and here) that ancient Jews assimilated over time following Roman subjugation to successive inhabitants of the Holy Land like the Arabs. Rather than the descendants of diaspora exiles, meanwhile, modern Jews in Europe and elsewhere largely descended from Jewish converts.

Thus Palestinian Arabs like Rehab, and not Jews who have settled modern Israel, have a far superior ancestral claim to what Rehab called without exception “Palestine,” central scene of the Bible’s narrative. Astonishingly, Rehab believes that the Jewish Old Testament and the New Testament narrative of how various Jews spread the Gospel of the Jew Jesus as messiah are part of his “Palestinian” history. Accordingly, Rehab criticized that Israeli Jews “should not be able to confiscate” the Biblical story along with the Holy Land and denounced “myths” of Jews coming home to Israel. Palestinians lost “our narrative” in 1948 with Israel’s establishment and are now “aliens in the Holy Land.”

Hadrian also changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitalina in honor of his clan name. During this period the Romans intentionally violated Jewish law with the placement of pagan deity statues in Jerusalem’s ruins. By contrast, a Roman coin marking the capture of Jerusalem during the failed Jewish revolt of 70 AD bore the Latin inscription “Judaea Capta [Judea captured].”

Similarly, the Bible speaks a geographical language completely different from Rehab’s strained invocations of “Palestine.” Philip Farah of thePalestinian Christian Alliance for Palestine (PCAP) unintentionally recalled this truth while reading during the November 8 opening service from Isaiah 2:1-4. This passage’s famed reference to peoples who “will beat their swords into plowshares” presupposes that the “law will go out from Zion.” Rehab’s Prophet Jeremiah, meanwhile, spoke of a “God of Israel” common throughout the Bible.

With respect to modern Judaism therefore, the Gentile Rehab seems to reject the Apostle Paul’s injunction to “not be arrogant, but tremble” (Romans 11:20) before Judaism given Jesus’ statement that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). Unlike other Christians, Rehab draws apparently no affinity for Jews from the Old Testament’s original revelation of the one true “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Acts 3:13) completed in the New Testament. Rehab sees no connection between the “Jewish flesh” in which Jesus became God incarnate, now remembered or indeed transubstantiated in the Eucharist, as the late Catholic priest and scholar Richard John Neuhaus noted, and modern Jews. If anything, these Jews owe a theological debt to Rehab’s “Palestine.”

How important, really, is history to current affairs? Do events from the 7th century—or, more importantly, how we understand them—have any influence on U.S. foreign policy today?

By way of answer, consider some parallels between academia’s portrayal of the historic Islamic jihads and the U.S. government’s and media’s portrayal of contemporary Islamic jihads.

“Muslim freedom fighters” accompanies this picture appearing on a UK Standard report on Syria, rehashing an old but false motif

While any objective appraisal of the 7th century Muslim conquests proves that they were just that—conquests, with all the bloodshed and rapine that that entails—the historical revisionism of modern academia, especially within Arab and Islamic studies departments, has led to some portrayals of the Muslim conquerors as “freedom-fighters” trying to “liberate” the Mideast from tyrants and autocrats. (Beginning to sound familiar?)

Today’s approach to teaching the history of the Muslim conquests of the 7th century is something as follows: Yes, the Mideast was Christian, but local Christians helped Arab Muslims invade and subjugate their countries in preference to Christian Byzantine rule, which was oppressive due to doctrinal disagreements over the nature of Christ. Hence, the Muslim conquerors were actually “liberators.”

This perspective, as with many modern Western perspectives concerning Islam, is a product of modern day epistemic distortions, chief among them: 1) repackaged narratives of the “noble savage” myth—yes, 7th century Muslim invaders were coarse, but had elevated ideals, including a fierce love for freedom and religious tolerance in comparison to Christians of the time (not to mention now); and 2) entrenched political correction that seeks to whitewash the true history of Islam followed by the uncritical acceptance of Islamic apologetics, some of which border on the absurd.

Of course, before the Islamic “liberator” thesis had become mainstream, historians such as Alfred Butler, author of The Arab Conquest of Egypt, had this to say about it:

Even in the most recent historians it will be found that the outline of the story [of the 7th century conquest of Egypt] is something as follows: …. that the Copts generally hailed them [Muslims] as deliverers and rendered them every assistance; and that Alexandria after a long siege, full of romantic episodes, was captured by storm. Such is the received account. It may seem presumptuous to say that it is untrue from beginning to end, but to me no other conclusion is possible. [emphasis added; pgs. iv-v]

In fact, one of the major themes throughout Butler’s Arab Conquest of Egypt—which, published in 1902, is heavily based on primary sources, Arabic and Coptic, unlike more modern secondary works that promote the Islamic “liberator” thesis—is that “there is not a word to show that any section of the Egyptian nation viewed the advent of the Muslims with any other feeling than terror” (p. 236).

Modern academic “scholarship” is similar to kudzu, that uncontrollable weed or vine that can grow from a single planting and eventually entwine every trunk and branch within its reach, and link from shrub and hedge to form a canopy over even a forest that will deny other plants sunlight and rain. Wild kudzu suffocates and kills. Much like big government. Much like statism.

There has been an ongoing campaign over the decades to find feet of clay in Thomas Jefferson, in order to discredit and obviate his position on freedom (e.g., the whole Sally Hemings and Jefferson “affair,” the subject of books and movies), or, failing that, to appropriate him and his reputation for un-Jeffersonian purposes. The ivy-grown towers of modern academe are really bastions of kudzu. One must ascend the dying trees with a machete and hack down the canopy, and then descend again to uproot the killer weed. Vipers like cane snakes and rattlers hide in the dense scholarly foliage, and even black widows and brown recluses, ready to strike at anyone careless enough to step on or disturb them. However, academic kudzu can be further contained and eliminated with the herbicide of reason.

But, imagine Rudolph Evans’s magnificent statue of Jefferson in the Jefferson Memorial smothered in kudzu. That’s what academia has been doing to his life and reputation.

Earlier this month, a very odd and alarming book fell from the dense foliage, Denise Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: The Founders and Islam.* It purports to prove, or at least give the public the impression, that Jefferson smiled benevolently upon Islam, that Islam played a role in the formation of his political philosophy, that the wisdom to be found in the Koran somehow found its way into the Declaration of Independence.

This is as bizarre a thesis as one which would claim that Mao’s Little Red Book, Marx’s Das Kapital, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf somehow contributed to the corpus of literature upholding individual rights, laissez faire capitalism, and limited government, and that in Mao’s, Hitler’s and Marx’s books can be can be found the principles which moved Jefferson to compose the Declaration and the Founders to create the Constitution of the United States.

******************

The truth is that Jefferson’s inclusion of Muslims as deserving of civil rights protection, together with Jews, Hindus, and dissenting sects of Christianity, was wholly incidental. He did not think Muslims deserved any special attention. At least, there apparently is no record that he thought so. So there is no reason to “imagine” that Jefferson bit his nails raw over the treatment and future “perceptions” of Islam and Muslims, which is the impression one gets in Spellberg’s book. According to her and Jerome’s own notes (once one has brushed aside the kudzu), Jefferson paid Islam and Muslims no more attention than he paid to the flora and fauna of Virginia. In fact, far, far less attention.

Both Spellberg and Jerome highlight the fact that Jefferson held the first iftar in the White House in 1805. But that was a matter of discretion and diplomacy on Jefferson’s part. It was not an act of submission (Islam) nor even necessarily an act of “respect.”

Forgive me while I indulge in a bit of “imagining” myself. Picture Jefferson confounded by the record of Islam as we know it today. How was he going to reconcile the violent verses in the Koran, which abrogated the “peaceful” ones? How was he going to account for the estimated 1.5 million Europeans abducted from Western coastal towns by Muslim raiders and who disappeared into the maw of Islamic slavery from the 16th through the 19th centuries, never mind all those America seamen?

What conclusions would he reach once he grasped that Islam is at root a totalitarian ideology strutting about in the vestments of religion, and demanding that Western nations accommodate Islam Sharia law at the price of subverting and suborning Western jurisprudence and freedom of speech? How would he explain Syria, and Egypt, and Libya, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and Kenya, and all the murders, beheadings, stonings, amputations, massacres, rapes, honor killings, female genital mutilations, the marriages of pubescent girls, and destruction committed in Allah’s name, not only in the Mideast, but in Europe, as well?

How would he view Mohammad the “prophet” when he learned that his actual existence is in dispute, and that anyway, if he did exist, he was an illiterate, rapacious, murdering brigand and warlord given to “hearing” voices, and hardly the sagacious “lawgiver” on a par with Solon? What would he think when he read contemporary accounts of Mohammad’s conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, accounts that portrayed him as a kind of Al Capone of his time?

Perhaps a fairer “imagining” would be to put Spellberg and Jerome in Jefferson’s shoes, without the benefit of the camouflage of scholarly kudzu.

Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and suspense novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all available on Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security Matters, Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.

Rereading some early history books concerning the centuries-long jihad on Europe, it recently occurred to me how ignorant the modern West is of its own past. The historical narrative being disseminated today bears very little, if any, resemblance to reality.

Consider some facts for a moment:

A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the 7th century, the jihad burst out of Arabia. Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered, today casually called the “Islamic world”—including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of India and China—much of Europe was also, at one time or another, conquered by the sword of Islam.

In 846 Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim Arab raiders; some 700 years later, in 1453, Christendom’s other great basilica, Holy Wisdom (or Hagia Sophia) was conquered by Muslim Turks, permanently.

The few European regions that escaped direct Islamic occupation due to their northwest remoteness include Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. That, of course, does not mean that they were not attacked by Islam. Indeed, in the furthest northwest of Europe, in Iceland, Christians used to pray that God save them from the “terror of the Turk.” These fears were not unfounded since as late as 1627 Muslim corsairs raided the Christian island seizing four hundred captives, selling them in the slave markets of Algiers.

Nor did America escape. A few years after the formation of the United States, in 1800, American trading ships in the Mediterranean were plundered and their sailors enslaved by Muslim corsairs. The ambassador of Tripoli explained to Thomas Jefferson that it was a Muslim’s “right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”

In short, for roughly one millennium—punctuated by a Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing—Islam daily posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and by extension Western civilization.

And therein lies the rub: Today, whether as taught in high school or graduate school, whether as portrayed by Hollywood or the news media, the predominant historic narrative is that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians. That’s exactly what a TV personality recently told me live on Fox News.

So here we are, paying the price of being an ahistorical society: A few years after the Islamic strikes of 9/11—merely the latest in the centuries-long, continents-wide jihad on the West—Americans elected a man with a Muslim name and heritage for president, who openly empowers the same ideology that their ancestors lived in mortal fear of, even as they sit by and watch to their future detriment.

Surely the United States’ European forebears—who at one time or another either fought off or were conquered by Islam—must be turning in their graves.

But all this is history, you say? Why rehash it? Why not let it be and move on, begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect, even if history must be “touched up” a bit?

This would be a somewhat plausible position—if not for the fact that, all around the globe, Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial impulse and intolerant supremacism that their conquering forbears did. The only difference is that the Muslim world is currently incapable of defeating the West through a conventional war.

During the Hannity’s America discussion Starnes made a veiled reference to “other parents” who made similar attempts to rid public school texts of Saudi influenced depictions of Islam that avoid the violence and subjugation of Christians and Jews in conquered lands during the great sweep of Jihad 13 centuries ago. A Jihad fomented by Mohammed and his warriors that depopulated Arabia of both Christians and Jews.

One of those “other parents” Starnes referred to was Aya Sewell, descendent of 18th Century Americans on one side of her family who fought for freedom in the Revolutionary war and whose later descendents converted to Judaism. On the other side of her family are Iraqi Jews with the family name of Asher, one of the original tribes of Israel. Her Iraqi Jewish forebears were residents in Babylonia after being taken as slaves following the destruction of the First Temple in 586 C.E.

The Ashers were among the 150,000 Jews ejected from Iraq following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Their properties, businesses and assets were expropriated by the Iraqi Arab nationalists. Some of those Iraqi Jews actually walked from Baghdad to freedom in Israel after the expulsion. Others came via flights from Iran. They were among the 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands, the so-called “forgotten refugees.” Those refugees and their descendents taken in by Israel now constitute half of the population of the Jewish nation.

Aya has one more painful family memory – the murder of her great grandmother Massouda and her son, Ephraim as they alighted from a bus in Baghdad during the Farhud (violent displacement in Arabic).

Farhud was a two day Jihad against Jews in February 1941 that resulted in several hundred rapes and deaths. The Farhud was part of a pro-Nazi putsch of Raschid Ali in Iraq fomented by the notorious Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who fled Baghdad in April 1941 after the British quashed the uprising to become Hitler’s house guest in Berlin during WWII. While there he promoted the Final Solution, the murder of Six Million European Jewish men, women and children. The murders of her Iraqi Jewish family members in 1941 were Jihad. The expropriations that they suffered after the State of Israel was born in the late 1940’s were the equivalent of jizya, a gigantic communal poll tax a form of hush money for having been spared death. Aya’s family found sanctuary in Israel and the West.

Those bitter family memories of 20th Century Arab Muslim Jihad may have propelled Aya’s activism when she discovered a world history textbook that did not portray the Islam doctrine that took the lives of members of her Iraqi Jewish family. The textbook conveyed a portrait of Islam as a benevolent religion that tolerated Christians and Jews as protected People of the Book dismissing Judeo Christian values, the bedrock of our Constitution. That portrayal is known in Islamic doctrine as taqiyya religiously sanctioned dissimilitude, more commonly referred to as “lying for Allah”. That amounts to da’wah, the call to Islam, religious proselytizing, a violation of the separation of church and state principle in the First Amendment of our Constitution.

Biased textbook used by Sarasota County public schools.

What concerned Aya was that her older son’s Sarasota public high school was purchasing these history texts with hers and other Florida taxpayers’ funds. When she confronted the administrator of her older son’s higher school, she was told that the text was on the approved list of the Florida Department of Education and part of the “holistic education “for students like her son. Subsequently when her younger son attended the Charter “School of Arts and Sciences” a similar text was used.

Aya sought out the assistance of others including the Christian Action Network and Act! For America. That association led her to the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan that facilitated a forensic examination of the public high school world history text. Armed with that information she initiated a School district hearing about these defective world history texts laying out the forensic information about the Qur’anic verses and other doctrine excerpted in them. The school district board defended the world history texts as consistent with the multicultural curricula objectives.

A world history book used in an Advanced Placement class is under review by a Florida school board over allegations it favors Islam at the expense of Christianity and Judaism.

State Rep. Ritch Workman told Fox News the Prentice World History textbook rewrites Islamic history and presents a biased version of the Muslim faith.

“The book has a 36-page chapter on Islam but no chapters on Christianity or Judaism,” Workman said. “It’s remarkably one-sided.”

The textbook is being used in an Advanced Placement class in Brevard County schools. The book is on a state-approved list and has been used in the school system for the past three years without any complaints.

Workman said he received a copy of the book and he said it’s clear the authors “make a very obvious attempt not to insult Islam by reshaping history.”

“If you don’t see it from the eyes of a parent, kids are going to take this book as gospel and believe that Christians and Jews were murderous barbarians and thank God the Muslims came along and the world is great,” he said.

For example, Workman said a reference to Mohammed and his armies taking over Medina states, “people happily accepted Islam as their way of life.”

“It leaves out that tens of thousands of Jews and non-believers were massacred by Mohammed’s armies,” he said. “It’s a blatant deception.”

The book indicates that Jesus proclaimed himself to be the Messiah while stating as fact that Mohammed is a prophet, Workman said. Students are also given lessons on the Koran and the five pillars of Islam. The

“They don’t do that for Christianity,” he said. “That is offensive to me.”

While unrest in Turkey continues to capture attention, more subtle and more telling events concerning the Islamification of Turkey—and not just at the hands of Prime Minister Erdogan but majorities of Turks—are quietly transpiring. These include the fact that Turkey’s Hagia Sophia museum is on its way to becoming a mosque.

Why does the fate of an old building matter?

Because Hagia Sophia—Greek for “Holy Wisdom”—was for some thousand years Christianity’s greatest cathedral. Built in 537 in Constantinople, the heart of the Christian empire, it was also a stalwart symbol of defiance against an ever encroaching Islam from the east.

After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts, Constantinople was finally sacked by Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its crosses desecrated and icons defaced, Hagia Sophia—as well as thousands of other churches—was immediately converted into a mosque, the tall minarets of Islam surrounding it in triumph.

Then, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, as part of several reforms, secularist Ataturk transformed Hagia Sophia into a “neutral” museum in 1934—a gesture of goodwill to a then triumphant West from a then crestfallen Turkey.

Thus the fate of this ancient building is full of portents. And according to Hurriyet Daily News, “A parliamentary commission is considering an application by citizens to turn the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque…. A survey conducted with 401 people was attached to the application, in which more than 97 percent of interviewees requested the transformation of the ancient building into a mosque and afterwards for it to be reopened for Muslim worship.”

Even lesser known is the fact that other historic churches are currently being transformed into mosques, such as a 13th century church building—portentously also named Hagia Sophia—in Trabzon. After the Islamic conquest, it was turned into a mosque. But because of its “great historical and cultural significance” for Christians, it too, during Turkey’s secular age, was turned into a museum and its frescoes restored. Yet local authorities recently decreed that its Christian frescoes would again be covered and the church/museum turned into a mosque.

Similarly, the 5th century Studios Monastery, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, is set to become an active mosque. And the existence of the oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world, 5th century Mor Gabriel Monastery is at risk. Inhabited today by only a few dozen Christians dedicated to learning the monastery’s teachings, the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Jesus and the Orthodox Syriac tradition, neighboring Muslims filed a lawsuit accusing the monks of practicing “anti-Turkish activities” and of illegally occupying land which belongs to Muslim villagers. The highest appeals court in Ankara ruled in favor of the Muslim villagers, saying the land that had been part of the monastery for 1,600 years is not its property, absurdly claiming that the monastery was built over the ruins of a mosque—even though Muhammad was born 170 years after the monastery was built.

Erick Stackelbeck, host of the show “Erick Stackelbeck on Terror” interviews Guy Rodgers, Executive Director of ACT! for America and former educator who outlines the pro-Islamic bias discovered in American textbooks during an extensive study conducted by ACT! for America Education.

You can view the textbook report as well as information about how to take action in your school here:

MEMRI: CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad: “Islam and the U.S. Are Twins, Linked by Common Values, There Are Accounts that Muslims Discovered America before Columbus”
Iqra TV (Saudi Arabia) – December 27, 2012

Interviewer: Once again, I greet you from the USA, and specially, from New York. Today’s topic is the American Islamic organizations.

Nihad Awad: In my view, Islam and the US are twins, linked by common values. The values on which the US was founded are the same values advocated by Islam: freedom, and especially freedom of religion, freedom of speech, protection of minorities, and spreading justice among all sectors of society.

[…]

The combination of my American nationality and the practice of my Islamic religion creates a beautiful blend, I believe. This is a civilized blend, which proves that Islam flourishes in an atmosphere of freedom, and spreads freedom, justice, and equality. Every day I live as an American-Muslim citizen, I rediscover the firm bonds between the humane system that the US created for its people, and the values advocated by Islam. This marriage of Islam and the US will be the best suited for humanity, because the Islamic values are divine values, conveyed by Allah. The Prophet Muhammad lived by these values, and Muslims today must rise to their level. The US is not perfect, but it is moving “toward a more perfect union.”

[…]

It is extremely important to know how Islam began in the US. There are historical accounts according to which the Muslims preceded Columbus, who is said to have discovered the US. Some documents and accounts indicate that Muslim seafarers were the first to reach the US. The bottom line is that Islam played a part in the establishment and development of the US.

[…]

Islam’s worldview is one of coexistence, of respect for pluralism, and of peace. Allah says in the Koran: “Oh Mankind! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes so that you may know one another. The noblest of you, in the sight of Allah, is the most pious among you.” This is a very important humane, social, and political principle. This is the principle of interacting with the other, be it nations, individuals, institutions, or countries. This verse was conveyed 1,400 years ago. This is a very important principle on how we should interact with others. As Muslims, we are not hostile to other societies. The underlying principle guiding our relations with them is one of respect for the natural differences between individuals, nations, and societies, but there are also common interests. Diversity in Islam is a good thing, not a shortcoming. Most of the wars waged between nations were the result of failure to respect and acknowledge the other.

[…]

When I said that Islam and the US are twins, I was referring to the values upon which the US was founded. I was talking about domestic affairs. US society consists of all of humanity – all the ethnicities, a society of immigrants. The US is the most diverse human union. How did the US manage to create this human fabric? This human experience was, undoubtedly, based on very important principles, which are identical to the Islamic values. The problem lies in the foreign policy. We are not talking about the foreign policy. I am one of the most adamant opponents of my country’s policy… Foreign policy is another matter altogether.

[…]

After 9/11, we saw great interest among the American public in becoming better acquainted with Islam by studying and reading about it. We found that very few books on Islam were available in the public libraries, which are frequented by many Americans, and that most of these books were misleading or anti-Islamic. Therefore, we decided to publish several books on Islam, written by Muslims and non-Muslims. We decided to send them free-of-charge to the American public libraries.

[…]

There are 16,200 public libraries in the US, serving 300 million Americans. We managed to provide this collection, free-of-charge, to half of these libraries.

[…]

With regard to our sister Aafia Siddiqui, this is undoubtedly a sensitive criminal case and a security issue.

Interviewer: Who is she?

Nihad Awad: Aafia Siddiqui is originally from Pakistan, as far as I know. She is incarcerated in the US, having received a long prison sentence, for her alleged involvement in – quote, unquote – “terrorist acts.” We are in CAIR are following this case, through our New York chapter. In 2013, in the coming weeks, we will dedicate more attention to her. We will follow the case, and see what we can do.

[…]

I personally intervened in this case, without talking about it in the media. I can reassure the brothers and sisters who called this show that I have personally dealt with this case on a high level in the US, and even in diplomatic circles. When we have any news, we will let you know.

Congratulations on issuing your new report, Education or Indoctrination. What inspired you to embark on this project?

Gabriel: When I was doing research for my second book “They Must Be Stopped,” I came across numerous instances where information that was being put in school textbooks or taught in classrooms was inaccurate, sometimes outright false, and at times sounded more like indoctrination than education. ACT! For America Education executive director and I discussed this at length in 2009, because when we traveled and spoke to groups about this they were very concerned. We investigated the issue more closely and found there had been a handful of previous studies done on this, but we believed much more needed to be done. We also knew that if we did a report, we could leverage its impact by drawing on the strength of our growing grassroots organization. So by late 2009 we drafted a plan, created the budget to do it, and embarked on the research in early 2010.

FP: How broad was your research?

Gabriel: We retained a top-notch team of experts with years of experience in this area. They selected 38 textbooks based on how widespread they are used in the schools and how much they address the topic of Islam. To give you an example of the breadth of the research, our team spent two years conducting the research, and comparing what they found with credible historical sources as well as Islamic sources. The results were astonishing, even to those of us who are familiar with this issue.

In some books the errors were less frequent and egregious, but in most of the books errors of the commission and omission occurred with such frequency that it was clearly evident the average student today is receiving a rewrite of history that paints a rose-colored picture of the history and central doctrines of Islam that is not supported by the facts. The report is painstakingly and thoroughly documented, with nearly 375 footnotes and a bibliography of nearly 275 sources.

FP: What type of topics do you address in your report?

Gabriel: The report examines everything from the founding of Islam and its early history, up through modern times. The report addresses a broad range of topics such as:

– Muhammad and Jerusalem

– Relationship between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina

– Sharia law

– Status and treatment of Jews and Christians under Islam

– Jihad and the early Islamic conquests

– Islam and women

– Islam and slavery

– Islamism

– The Crusades

– The Holocaust

– The Arab-Israeli conflict

– Terrorism

– 9/11

FP: Share a few examples with us.

Gabriel:

1) Slavery: While the books went into great detail exposing and condemning the Atlantic slave trade run by Europeans, they were all either completely or nearly silent on the Islamic slave trade, which began eight centuries before the Atlantic slave trade and continues in some parts of the world today. This double standard treatment of Islam vs. the West was fairly common in the books we reviewed. The danger here is that students are led to draw conclusions about the West with respect to slavery that they aren’t led to draw when it comes to Islam.

2) Islamic Conquests: Book after book used phrases like “Muslim conquerors treated those they conquered with tolerance.” Some books claimed, falsely, that conquered Jews and Christians retained religious freedom. One book said, “Full religious freedom.” Another said the Muslim conquerors were “extremely tolerant.” Such a rewrite of history, when there is so much historical data that contradicts these false assertions, could well be termed educational malpractice. And like the issue of slavery, look how it leads students to rosy, positive views of the history of Islam that simply don’t square with the facts.

3) Treatment of Women: The books typically either devoted little attention to this subject, or when they did, they overlooked or downplayed the second-class treatment of women under Islamic law and in Muslim cultures. Actually the word downplayed is an understatement. Some even claimed that women had more rights than they did. Again, this was consistent with a narrative the books created about the supposed tolerance and goodness of historical Islam.

4) Jihad. Not surprisingly, the books generally toed the politically correct line that “Jihad” is essentially a “struggle to be a better Muslim.” I like how my friend Dr. Walid Phares describes this description of Jihad as “Islamic Yoga.” Students get almost no understanding of the centrality of Jihad to the historical advance of Islam through conquest and the creation of the Islamic Empire. They are therefore conditioned to agree with the apologists for radical Islam and the talking heads from groups like CAIR who describe Jihad completely differently from what happened in history and how the vast majority of ancient and contemporary Islamic scholars define Jihad. Again, this fits the narrative the books have created about historical Islam that simply isn’t accurate.

5) 9/11. This is especially disturbing. It’s one thing to rewrite ancient history. People can debate about the reliability of various historic accounts. However, we all know, except for the conspiracy crowd and politically correct deniers, that 9/11 was an act of Jihad perpetrated by 19 Islamic jihadists. Yet almost without exception, the textbooks we reviewed did not tell the students this. They called them “Terrorists,” some referred to Al Qaeda (but didn’t describe what it is), but they completely ignored any reference to the terrorists as “Muslims” or Jihadists.” One book described them as those who believe they are fighting for a noble cause! It would be as if school books written in 1951 described those attacking Pearl Harbor as an enemy fleet without ever telling students who they were or why they did it. It is an astonishing rewrite of modern history done obviously to appease the forces of political correctness – but it’s not historical education.

FP: What can people do — especially those who are very concerned about this and have kids in schools?

Gabriel: They should go to www.actforamericaeducation.org, and read either the executive summary or the full report or both. They can download and print either or both. There is an action item option on that page where they can find out things they can do. We mailed the executive summary to over 70,000 state and local school board members, and this year a number of our chapter leaders and members met with school board members and school officials to bring their attention to this report. We are going to continue this effort over the next two years, and our goal is to convince as many of the book publishers as we can that they need to revise their books so that they treat the history and central doctrines of Islam more accurately. We’re not opposed to teaching about the major religions in the public schools, as this is part of our history and culture. But the teaching should be accurate, and when it comes to Islam, most of the time it simply isn’t.

FP: Brigitte Gabriel, it was an honor to speak with you. Thank you for everything you do for the cause of freedom and liberty.

We encourage all of our readers to go to actforamericaeducation.org and to read the report and then to spread the word and make a difference.